The Walking Dead Season 4's Michael Cudlitz: Abraham Is "Not to Be F—d With"

There are already so many characters to follow in the second half of The Walking Dead Season 4, but fans will probably love Sgt. Abraham Ford. It would be surprising if they didn’t — eventually anyway — especially with an actor like Michael Cudlitz in the role.

Major spoiler alert out of the gate: Showrunner Scott Gimple has already talked about how we’ll get into the newbies’ stories “in a deep way” in Season 5. So get used to Abraham, and prepare to see even more of him next season.

TV Guide asked Michael to talk about his version of this iconic comic book character. “When we meet Abraham, one of the things that we realize most about him is that he's very mission-oriented at this point. You're not going to learn a lot about how he emotionally feels about things necessarily. He's very reactive. He keeps his eye on the target. He's not to be f—d with. He will kill you.” Down boy!

The mission is to protect Dr. Eugene Porter (Josh McDermitt) and get him to Washington, D.C. Rosita Espinosa (Christian Serratos) is Abraham’s girlfriend, but hopefully we’ll get to know her as more than that too. “They have been traveling alone together for a bit now and they're kind of f—ing sick of each other as people,” Michael told TV Guide of the trio. “They annoy the hell out of each other. It's almost as if you were to say they are siblings to a strange degree. But I can't kill any of them, so I guess we gotta move forward. They're all integral to what we're doing. Rosita is entirely effective and efficient. I've trained her and made her that way. She's useful. And Eugene is the package, so we have to protect the package.”

So the mission is everything to Abraham, but his hair and mustache are pretty much everything to us. Michael talked about the signature style when discussing his favorite part of playing this role. “The insane, orange hair, slap-back, handlebar mustache, just the whole look of him. He walks into a room and just wants to fight. It's like a permission slip to be the biggest douche you ever wanted to be.” Ha! Add Abraham to the list of lovable zombie apocalypse “douches,” alongside maybe Merle and Shane … and Carl on occasion.

Like all characters, Abraham is learning from past experiences and that’s changed his behavior. “He's coming from some other events that have happened very recently and those play into how he treats new people and how they move forward.” He’s no-nonsense, and we get a hint of that in the Episode 11 promo where it looks like he wants Glenn to accept that “she” (Maggie? Tara?) is dead and he shouldn’t have to die too. He’s recruiting for his mission!